Game industry outsiders often overlook how much console sales are driven by quality games and how often a suddenly popular game can completely change the market

Game industry outsiders often overlook how much console sales are driven by quality games and how often a suddenly popular game can completely change the market. Consider for example how the Monster Hunter series became a cultural phenomenon in Japan and made the Playstation Portable incredibly successful. In contrast Sony's Monster Hunterless followup system, the Playstation Vita, has been a failure. Of course it's impossible to predict which games will become phenomenons (though Nintendo seems to strike gold more often than others) and so when predicting game industry fortunes you have to make a prediction ignoring the possibility of a random breakout title, but then footnote that "of course anything could happen."